March 19, 2018

Elevator Music — Off-White x Byredo

When Virgil Abloh, the creative director of Off-White (and longtime collaborator with Kanye West), decided to introduce his first perfume, he had only one request: He wanted it to smell like nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

Mr. Abloh envisioned a fragrance so delicate that it would exist only in the background, a scent so hushed and unassuming that it was barely detectable to the human nose.

He delivered this invisible vision to Ben Gorham, who runs the fragrance house Byredo, and together they produced a scent called Elevator Music.

The first perfume from Virgil Abloh and Ben Gorham will be introduced at Barneys New York on May 17.

The see-through scent contains soft notes of violet, bamboo, and musk, but is so subtle that it nearly disappears on wrist contact.

"We came up with the concept of elevator music because we both grew up in the 90s," Mr. Gorham said, speaking by phone while traveling in Dubai. "Background music had such a negative connotation then, but it was something we could relate to."

Think of the fragrance ($275 for 100 milliliters) as more of a backdrop to your life than as something that stands by itself.

It is nondescript on purpose.

"The idea," Mr. Gorham said, "is that its wearer is noticed, not the perfume."

It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.

Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.

The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.

Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.

Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the point at which gravitational force would overcome inertia and cause the water to fall.

What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.

The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.

Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.

The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second.

Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.

To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.

The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequency should be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. They then made friends with a curator at Zoo New England, the nonprofit group that operates the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., who let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap at the speeds predicted by the engineers.

The animal who inspired this exercise of the engineer’s art is a black cat named Cutta Cutta, who belongs to Dr. Stocker and his family. Cutta Cutta’s name comes from the word for “many stars” in Jawoyn, a language of the Australian aborigines.

Dr. Stocker’s day job at M.I.T. is applying physics to biological problems, like how plankton move in the ocean. “Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,” Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving. He consulted Dr. Reis, an expert in fluid mechanics, and the study was under way.

At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.

The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.

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Here is a video interview with two of the scientists involved in the study.

Animals have developed a range of drinking strategies dependingon physiological and environmental constraints. Vertebrateswith incomplete cheeks use their tongue to drink; the most commonexample is the lapping of cats and dogs. We show that the domesticcat (Felis catus) laps by a subtle mechanism based on wateradhesion to the dorsal side of the tongue. A combined experimentaland theoretical analysis reveals that Felis catus exploits fluidinertia to defeat gravity and pull liquid into the mouth. Thiscompetition between inertia and gravity sets the lapping frequencyand yields a prediction for the dependence of frequency on animalmass. Measurements of lapping frequency across the family Felidaesupport this prediction, which suggests that the lapping mechanism isconserved among felines.